Misery Before and After the Beatles Rooftop Concert

The Beatles Anthology documents the Beatles through interview, the misery that they were struggling with before and after the Rooftop Concert. According to George, though their rows never led to fisticuffs, they did come close. His solution was to go home and write the song, ‘Wah Wah’ that was released on his solo album, “All Things Must Pass.” In many ways this album is a send off to his Beatle days. George states (p. 316) that the tension was so bad that at one point Ringo left the group and John wanted to leave. “I got up and I thought, ‘I’m not doing this anymore. I’m out of here.’” That’s when he went home to write ‘Wah Wah.’

It is unanimous that if it weren’t for Paul’s pushiness, life in the studio, way before the Rooftop Concert would not have been so miserable. When confronted, Paul states that he was perhaps overly enthusiastic with his demands on his fellow Beatles. “If I made a suggestion and it was something that, say, George didn’t want to do, it could develop quite quickly into a mini argument. In fact George walked out of the group. I’m not sure of the exact reason, but I think that they thought I was being too domineering.” After George left, the rest of the Beatles went over to John’s house to discuss the ongoing problems. After this meeting, they all went to George’s house and according to Ringo, “We all went to visit George at his house and we told him we loved him, and it got sorted and then he came back.”

John states the misery began at the peak of their career, where “we were cutting each other down to size. We were limiting our capacity to write and perform by having to fit it into some kind of format, and that’s why it caused trouble.” In fact, according to George Martin, John told him that”I don’t want any of your production shit. We want this to be an honest album,” referring to ‘Let It Be.’ It was probably John who along with Paul was looking forward to playing live once again, because they were sick of recording after the The Beatles ‘White’ album and production for the ‘Get Back’ album was underway. “So that was the main thing – live we were a great band. Forget about all your MBEs and recording careers and all this sort of stuff; it was really down to being a good band. I’d hope that by playing like this in live performance, it would get us all to relise that maybe we didn’t need all the highfalutin stuff. We could just keep on playing and everything would sort itself out.”

Yet this wasn’t to be. After the Rooftop Concert, the Beatles were back in the studio struggling with completing ‘Let It Be’ and going onto ‘Abbey Road,’ which was released in May 1970, before ‘Let It Be’ even though it was finished first.

“Misery Before and After the Beatles Rooftop Concert” was written by Brenne Meirowitz. Copyright Brenne Meirowitz 2014. All Rights Reserved.